Registration Changes

[Darren Jeffries]

There have been a recent speight of Spam sign-ups, which appear to have been performed by actual humans as they have got past all the security measures.

 

All the offending members have now been removed and welcome messages removed too.

 

As a result of this, registration security has now been boosted and all new members will have to be activated by a member of the admin team.

 

I hate having to do this but there have been 4 today with references in their names to either meds or porn, and this is a family friendly site.

[CaptOblivious]

Sounds like a good plan. I wonder why the sudden influx? Oh well...it happens to all good boards eventually. I take it a sign of our popularity :D

[Martijn Meerts]

A large email spammer was recently caught and shut down, I guess the spammers are more actively looking for different routes right now.

[Guest ___]

A large email spammer was recently caught and shut down, I guess the spammers are more actively looking for different routes right now.

 

 

I'm not sure why a spammer would try to hit the forums though. I do recall when I was an admin on a scooter forum a few years ago (Vespa, Lambretta) that we had dealers spamming the forums trying to sell scooters, but I can't see why anyone would hit a model railway forum to spam. 

[Martijn Meerts]

I think the answer to that is fairly straight forward.. "Because they can" .. It doesn't cost them much, if anything, but it might get them some hits.

[Railmind]

I think the only reason for forum spam is the number of messages posted. E.g. someone paid for 100k links to their website. I have had some experience in maintaining a forum, the best solution was to install a non-standard captcha module. However the times do change and I have also seen a number of human posters making useless comments from time to time (like "good work",  "I haven't tried but looks good") with spam in their signatures.

[alpineaustralia]

I am really going to show my ignorance here but how does this work. They become a member for the forum and then what?

[CaptOblivious]

Yeah, I can't figure it out either, because their profiles don't have links in them. They never post. I don't get it. It's the same thing on my blogs.

[CaptOblivious]

We are working to make registration simultaneously less onerous for genuinely interested users and more onerous for spam-bots. Stay tuned, but we think we'll be lifting the moderator-approval requirement shortly! Of course, this means nothing to already-registered users, but it is welcome news I hope for lurkers thinking about joining.